Something Beautiful
by aurrasingrules102
Summary: Jaina Solo has defeated her twin, Darth Caedus, in battle and is now determined to follow her heart and make right her relationship with Jag Fel. This is a short story set in the EU Legends storyline of Star Wars and focuses on those characters. It is post-Invincible, which is the last book of the Legacy of the Force series, and pre-Fate of the Jedi.


The stormtroopers at the door only reluctantly gave Jaina entry, even after scanning her twice with their blinking red wands and hearing the impatient sighs of her official escort. She bore it all with a tight lip and silence until one of them extended out an armored glove to confiscate her lightsaber.

"Absolutely not," she said softly, one hand extended in warning. When he persisted, she gripped the offending appendage above the wrist and pushed, just hard enough to send him stumbling back a step.

In unison, ten blaster rifles raised to point at her torso.

"That's enough," a new voice said, and Jaina lifted her head to see Jag standing in the doorway, arms crossed across his chest and a scowl of displeasure forming a line between his brows.

She felt her spine stiffen of its own accord, and her breath hitched a little in her throat. It had been more than three weeks since he had found her huddled over Jacen's body and coaxed her back to life, but so much had changed in the interim that it might as well have been a lifetime. Her injuries had healed and her spirit was on the mend, but things between them would never, could never, be the same.

When they had parted, Jag had been a hunter, a friend, and an ally, but just a man nonetheless. Now he stood across from her in a starched Imperial uniform, a dozen bars and epaulets pinned to his shoulder and breast, and the authority over an Empire resting in his hands. Gone was his beard and untrimmed hair, and he looked as if he had stepped right out of her memory, all stiff bearing and unsmiling face and piercing green eyes.

He wasn't looking at Jaina, though. His gaze was on the stormtrooper commander who had tried to take her saber. "Jedi Solo is always welcome here, Commander. You will not subject her to this sort of treatment again. Do you understand?"

Jaina couldn't see the soldier's face, but she felt the heat of his embarrassment radiate off of him like an ocean wave. "Yes, sir," the trooper saluted, and all of his men reholstered their weapons.

Only then did Jag turn to Jaina, and the small smile he gave her, meant only for her eyes, made her stomach clench into knots. He extended a hand to her, and she stepped forward and slid her arm through his.

They didn't speak again until his office door had closed behind them. "Thanks for that," she said, and punctuated her words by giving him a soft squeeze where her hand rested on the inside of his elbow.

"They're a little overzealous, but I'd rather have that than complacency," he explained, and extricated himself from her grip to pull out a chair for her. He didn't sit her across from his desk, which dominated a huge space before the open viewport, but in a semicircle of softer couches set off to the side. She watched him cross the dark blue carpet to the comm panel on the edge of his desk and press down on a button until a voice from the other end piped in, "Sir?"

"Hold all visitors and calls until further notice, Ensign," Jag instructed.

"Yes, sir," the man on the other end confirmed, and then Jag turned his full attention to Jaina.

"You look like someone I used to know," she smiled at him, and made sure her tone was light and playful and completely lacking in the nostalgic longing that had her heart beating a little faster than normal.

He came back to sit down across from her, and she took careful note of how easily it had all come back to him. He had broken out of this world, out of the rigid confines of his militaristic existence, during the years of his exile, but she could see now that you could take a man out of the uniform, but you couldn't really ever take the uniform out of the man. His back was perfectly straight, his boots shined, and every muscle in his body seemed tightly coiled and poised for action. This was who he was, deep down, and it suited him.

He ran a self-conscious hand over his bare jaw, which was slightly whiter than the rest of his face after years of hiding behind a beard. "I think the person you knew then would have run away screaming if he had seen me now," he intoned drily.

"No he wouldn't," Jaina grinned, and after a moment, he grinned back.

"No. He wouldn't," he agreed. "But he would have liked to."

There was a brief pause where they both were unsure of what to say next. They weight of what had happened on the _Anakin Solo_ rested heavy between them. Jaina shifted in her seat, uneasy, and pretended to examine the trappings of his office in great detail.

"Your injuries have healed well," Jag spoke into the silence. "No scars."

Jaina touched her face where it had been shredded open in battle with her brother, and where now there was only smooth skin. "Maybe I should have kept some. I hear they're coming back into fashion," she teased, and jerked her chin in the direction of the white scar trailing up from his eyebrow into his hairline. Jag's sudden rise into the public sphere had caused a huge wave of speculation and gossip, and not a small part of it had been about his uncanny good looks. His signature scar had been much discussed in entertainment programming as a mark of roguish heroism.

He rolled his eyes and threw up one hand, disgusted. "I knew you were going to make me pay for that."

Jaina laughed, and though it was genuine, it sounded strange in her own ears. She hadn't laughed, truly, in a long time. "What?" she asked, all innocence. "You don't like all the good press?"

He frowned at her, but she could tell it was all for show, just part of the dance they had been pirouetting their way through for almost twenty years. "I don't mind good press, if it had anything to do with my capabilities or policies, or even if it came from a reputable outlet. But those gossip rags and their arbitrary lists?" He shook his head.

Jaina leaned forward, elbows on knees and chin on propped hands, and batted her eyelashes prettily. "Tell me Chief of State Fel, how do you make time to run three hundred star systems and _still_ maintain those perfect abs?"

She thought it had been a good joke, but he didn't laugh. Instead, he scooted his right boot across the carpet until the polished toe nudged against hers. "Jaina," he said simply, and she thought he sounded both exasperated and affectionate, all rolled into one confusing tangle that she didn't know how to decipher.

She sat up straight again and smoothed away the imaginary wrinkles on her trousers. "So, are you going to give me the full tour, or what?"

He rose out of his chair in one fluid motion, hand extended to her once again. She took it in hers, and wondered how the feel of his palm against hers could be so familiar and so alien at the same time. She wasn't sure if he had meant to release her once she had been helped out of her seat, but she didn't let go.

"Want to see the TIE hangar?" he offered.

" _Yes_ ," she exclaimed. "Show me immediately."

Her palpable excitement inspired a sly grin from him in return, and he guided her to a sliding door on the other side of his office. When they passed through to the other side, she was initially disappointed to see it was only a conference room. A large and grandiose conference room, but one sorely lacking in TIE fighters. But then he lifted his free hand and pointed to the large window on the far wall. She reluctantly loosed her grip on him and went to investigate. Below the viewport was a massive hangar bay filled with the iconic one-man fighters, sectioned off into categories of style. There were dozens of Interceptors, Defenders, and Bombers, and another design she wasn't familiar with. The typical square paneled wings were tapered into a diamond shape, and were longer from dorsal to ventral tips.

"What are those?" she asked, and tapped the glass with one finger.

He moved to stand beside her, so close that she could feel his body heat through the space where their arms brushed. "Those are a new design, still in beta testing," he nodded. "They're called Razers. They are equipped with ion cannons."

Jaina's eyebrows shot up toward her hairline. "That's impressive. How did R&D manage the energy output necessary?"

He shrugged one shoulder. "They lightened up the frame so the engines had less to push. It's not as tough as some of the others. You definitely wouldn't want to take a good hit in one."

"Speed?" Jaina queried, hungry eyes on the machines below.

"Faster than those StealthX's you ride around in," he nudged her good-naturedly with one elbow.

She turned her back to the display below and leaned against the viewport, arms crossed across her chest. "Speed's not everything, Jagged. You've gotta know what to do with what you've got, too."

He arched one imperious brow at her. "Are you suggesting I don't know what to do with my own equipment?"

She shook her head, but didn't take her eyes from his. "No," she said at last, and couldn't keep herself from reaching out to run her fingertips across the perfectly straight seam along his shoulder, "that's one thing no one could say about you, Jag."

He looked down at his shoulder and the place where her hand had come to rest on his lapel, then back up into her eyes. Jaina swallowed, hard, and said with false levity, "Well, what are you waiting for? Let's go take a look up close—" As she spoke, she pivoted away from him and toward the door, and let her caress fall away from his chest and down the length of his arm. She was halfway through her turn, with the feel of his gold sleeve buttons just barely grazing her skin, when his hand shot out and clamped around her bicep, just above the elbow, and pulled her back in close.

She heard her own sharp intake of breath, and bit down hard on her lip as a silent self-punishment. Jag was leaning down toward her, green eyes blazing and inscrutable, and she was torn between pulling away and tilting up on her toes to meet him. "What are you doing?" he demanded, and his tone was not soft or romantic or filled with longing; it was as hard as durasteel.

Jaina tried to tug her arm away from him, but he held her firmly in place. "What are you talking about?" she snapped, and lifted her nose in an indignant stance she hoped would cover the rising heat in her cheeks.

"You're _flirting_ with me," he concluded, and it sounded almost like a chastisement.

Jaina put on her best incredulous look and scoffed, "So? We _always_ flirt."

He shook his head, adamant, and his hand squeezed her arm a little tighter. When he spoke, it was only a whisper. "No," he countered, "don't do that. Don't pretend like you don't know the difference between what we used to be and what we are now. I'm not confused, and neither are you. You've made things perfectly clear over the past year. You've done everything you could to keep me at arm's length. So what are you doing here, now?"

His words cut to the quick, like a lightsaber to the heart of their problems. He would have no mercy on her then, and she couldn't really blame him. She didn't deserve his mercy. She didn't deserve his friendship or forgiveness, either, but he'd freely given her back both of those. For this, though? No. He'd drawn his line in the sand she would have to be the one to step across it.

Jaina made a conscious decision to let the tension leech from her body. She had been straining away from his grip, but now she relaxed into it with a sigh. She looked up into his green eyes and asked, softly, "Don't you already know, Jag?"

His jaw clenched and unclenched, but then he answered, "I want to hear the words. I think I deserve that much."

And she couldn't argue with that, because he did. He had earned the right to hear it, and more. He had been steady and true for all their long years together, unwavering and strong and reliable, and she had let him down time and time again. She couldn't make it up to him, but she could, just this once, be brave enough to bare her soul.

"Do you remember the day we met?" she asked him, keeping her eyes on the wall just behind his head.

"Of course," he answered, and there was a note of tenderness in his words that hadn't been there before. "Over Ithor."

Jaina screwed her courage to the sticking place, turned her eyes up to meet his, and confessed, "Do you know how old I was that day, Jag? Sixteen. I was sixteen years old when I fell in love with you, and I've never stopped. I've spent the majority of my life wanting you, and no one but you. I love Zekk, but it was never the same, and I think you know that already. I hated how you two acted around each other, but the truth is that there was never any competition. It has always, and will always, be only you, until my dying—"

She didn't get to finish. Her final words were cut short when he leaned down and claimed her mouth in a kiss, their first kiss in so long that Jaina felt something like an outcast coming home at last. His taste was warm and familiar on her tongue, an ambrosia she had been craving in every cell of her body for longer than she could remember. She could hear every unspoken thing between pass silently between them in the touch of his lips: anger and forgiveness, reticence and capitulation, hurt and healing, love and desire. For some couples, the weight of their time apart might have poisoned the well beyond hope, but with every breath they shared, passed between them in gasps of longing and pleasure, she could feel the last of their pains leech away.

When he laid her back across the conference room table, Jaina made nary a peep of protest. She _wanted_ him, wanted him in a way that made her toes curl in her boots and her back arch off the table when he lifted her shirt and pressed an open-mouthed kiss to her breast. She hadn't imagined their reunion like this, but in the moment she felt the necessity of it so keen and sharp that there was no doubt in her mind. She needed to feel the press of his hands on her bare skin, to run her fingers through his hair and kiss the white line of his scar where it traced a path across his scalp.

The table beneath at her back, heavy as it was, stayed firmly put when he at last gripped the edges with both fists and pushed inside of her. Jaina clutched at his back with both hands, her face pressed into his neck, and rose up to match the rhythm he set.

She found her climax first, and he swallowed the loudest of her cries with a punishing kiss. Just as the sweeping pleasure of release was fading, he dug his fingers hard into her hips and shuddered against her as he came, too.

They both lay still and quiet save for their labored breathing for a long moment. Jaina savored the heavy drum of his heartbeat against hers, and the sweetness of his touch as he ran a hand down her side. When he did raise up and meet her eyes, she gave a short snort of laughter at the bedraggled state of his appearance. He looked as if he had marched two days through the wilderness and come out the other side exhausted, thirsty, and in need of a bath. But he only smiled back at her and shook his head, then pulled her back up into a sitting position.

"What _is it_ with us and conference rooms?" she quipped, and he surprised her with a long peal of uncharacteristic laughter.

"I don't know," he admitted, and placed a tender kiss on the top of her head before helping her to her feet and handing her her discarded clothes. "At least we're consistent."

"It's been so long I was worried we might have forgotten how," she continued in the same wry voice as she quickly dressed.

"Like riding a speeder bike," Jag grinned, and finished buttoning and straightening his uniform.

Jaina took a step closer, back into his personal space so their bodies were a mere whisper apart. She gave him a long, lingering look that swept him from head to toe before murmuring, "I think I prefer this, as far as rides go."

And just like that the sexual tension that had ebbed between them after their interlude came roaring back with a vengeance, hanging thick enough in the air that she could have sliced it with her lightsaber. The way his molten gaze fixed on her made Jaina's blood flow hot and fast through her veins, a shot of pure adrenaline.

Slowly, so slowly, he slipped his hand around the back of her neck and into her hair at the base of her skull, then made a tight fist that held her in place, right where he wanted her. Jaina's heart began to pound, not with anxiety but with fresh desire. Force, he knew just how to do it right.

He leaned against her, kiss only a breath away, and sighed, "Do you have any idea what you do to me?"

Before she could respond in kind, a loud beep echoed from somewhere above and a disembodied voice asked, "Chief of State Fel?"

Jag jerked his head up at the noise and Jaina saw his lips compress into a thin line of annoyance. "This better be good, Ensign."

There was the briefest of pauses, and then his subordinate answered. "Yes, sir. I have just been advised that Chief of State Daala has sent a special envoy to meet with you about the Unification Summit. He is debarking now, sir."

Jag gritted his teeth, then snapped, "See to it they are offered refreshment until I arrive."

"Yes, sir," was the crisp reply, and then a second beep to indicate the ensign had signed off.

"What now?" Jaina prodded, a bit wistful.

He turned back to her and exhaled slowly through his nose, like a man exercising his patience. "Now," he said, and released the handful of her brown locks that he had wrapped around his fist, "you are going to go rest in my quarters until I can meet you. If the envoy stays, do you want to take dinner with us?"

Jaina swallowed down her immediate refusal. She hated politics just as much as Jag did, and wanted to stay as far away from its machinations as possible. However, the import of his invitation was not lost on her. If she attended any such meal with galactic representatives, it wouldn't be as a Jedi or even as a Solo. It would be as Jag's date. They would be openly declaring their renewed romantic involvement to all of the gossip rags and rumor mongers of the galaxy. There would be no going back.

Jag saw the hesitation on her face and gently wiped a piece of stray hair back out of her eyes. "It's okay. I wouldn't go either if I didn't have to."

She squeezed his hand. "I don't want you to think it's because of anything other than politics. If you want to go on the Holonet right now and tell the galaxy what we just did on that table, I'll go stand with you. I just don't want to have dinner with a bunch of—" she waved her arm in a way that she hoped encompassed all the negative things she hated about politicians.

Luckily, Jag only looked amused, not offended. "I know that. You'll wait for me?"

She nodded, and he guided her quickly out a back entrance and through several winding corridors and security checkpoints before depositing her in his rooms with a kiss and a promise to hurry back.

Jaina took advantage of the solitude to nose about his quarters. She rifled through his stack of holocards—none had been mounted with a projector to be displayed as of yet—and found one of them together on Borleias, wearing their Twin Suns flight suits, that made her smile. She fingered the neat, orderly row of uniforms hung in his closet and even traded her own Jedi robes for a pair of his oversized pajamas and a shirt. Thus properly attired for their first sleepover, she proceeded to make a game of finding all the weapons he had hidden about the place in case of an emergency. She discovered a small blaster in the bedside table (too obvious, she clucked her tongue to herself), a vibroblade under the bathroom sink, a stun baton and second blaster tucked in among his socks, and the real coup, a classic E-11 and a sonic grenade in a secret compartment behind his headboard.

After this cursory inspection, she was tired enough to crawl beneath the covers of his too-large bed and bury her face in the pillow that smelled most strongly of him. Lying there in the quiet and semi-darkness, Jaina tried to resist the sense of déjà vu __threatening to overwhelm her. If she rolled onto her back and closed her eyes, she felt nineteen again, waiting each night for Jag to sneak into her bunk and keep the chill of deep space at bay.

Force, they had been young then. Young and reckless and fierce in their devotion. She had almost taken a court martial for him once, on Borleias, before they had ever so much as kissed. She had defied direct orders and almost gotten herself and another Jedi killed to rescue him in battle. A life where he was dead and she was expected to continue on had just been too empty to contemplate. When it was over and she had braced herself to face the consequences, Jag had stepped in and saved her right back.

How could she have ever thought she would get over that, over _him_? There was no getting over someone who had her back in the face of danger and certain death. There was no getting over a person who wouldn't back down or run away when she had been at the lowest and most vulnerable point in her life, but instead stood strong against her fits of wrath and despair. There was no getting over a man who challenged her, bled and sweat for her, laid his life and honor on the line for her every damn day, even when she deserved it the least. Who could ever compete with that?

Somehow she managed to drift off with these thoughts swirling through her brain, and was startled awake by the clang of plates against silverware. She sat straight up in bed to find a protocol droid setting the small dining table with a tray of food and bottle of wine.

"What's this?" she asked, and it snapped its metal head around in a perfect approximation of human startlement.

"Oh!" it exclaimed. "Pardon me, Miss. I am just setting the table for dinner. Are you hungry?"

Jaina was. She crawled out of the comfort and warmth of Jag's sheets and padded over to examine the fare. It was a simple Corellian dish they both had gained a taste for from their Corellian fathers, and a cheap wine they had often enjoyed together when they were young and broke and good drinks were hard to come by. She couldn't imagine where he had got the stuff on such short notice, but both made her grin.

She was just about halfway through when the door swept aside once more and Jag strode through. When his eyes settled on her, Jaina thought the naked affection she saw there was almost as good as anything else they had done together that day. "I see you've made yourself comfortable," he nodded at the night clothes she had appropriated from his closet.

"Very," she grinned at him over the rim of her wine glass. "Come sit with me."

He was happy to oblige her. As soon as he had settled himself in the chair opposite her, he began to unbutton the stiff collar of his uniform, wincing as it scraped against his neck. "So, how many of my weapons did you find?"

"Six," she admitted, and took another bite of her food. Whoever had cooked it had done an excellent job of approximating the salty, greasy, delicious taste of a traditional meal cooked and sold from a street vendor.

"You're losing your touch," he teased.

Jaina let her silverware clatter onto the plate. "No way. What did I miss?"

He shook his head firmly. "Nope. You'll have to find it on your own."

"Oh, I'll find it," she promised, and took a savage bite of a buttered roll.

"Don't be surly," he smiled as he picked up his own fork. "You can't win them all."

Jaina scowled at him across the table, but there was no heat behind it. She was far too happy to be there, alone with him, to let anything ruin her mood for real. "We'll see," she prevaricated, and then switched the subject back to matters more important. "How did your meeting with the envoy go?"

He held up one hand for her to wait while he finished a particularly large bite. After wiping his mouth he said, "As good as can be expected. I'll be going back to Bastion soon, but after I've seen to the Moff Council and made sure everything is running the way I'd like, I'll have to come back for more unification talks."

She had known that his new job, if it could even be called that, would provide some interesting obstacles to their romance, but hearing it dampened her spirits nonetheless. He saw the shift in her mood, of course, being as attuned to her body language and thoughts as any Jedi. Their eyes met, and Jaina had a hard time swallowing her last bite of dinner. She took a swig of wine to give herself time to think, then asked, "So where does that leave us?"

If it hadn't been for his white knuckled grip on the armrests of his chair, he would have looked perfectly composed in the face of such a question. He had always been better than Jaina at remaining stoic in defiance of life's challenges, but she couldn't blame him for the small tell this time. A situation all too similar had been the thing that had broken them years before, and the ghost of those decisions and the following consequences loomed large in the room as she awaited his response.

"That," he nodded slowly, "has always been a decision for you, Jaina. You know where I stand."

It was not the glowing declaration of love she might have wanted. Technically, he hadn't even asked her to come with him. His words left her suddenly hesitant and unsure. He said she knew where he stood, but did she? Up until then, Jaina had not deliberately tried to read his emotions in the Force. In the past few years where they were allies and nothing more, she had grown into the habit of honoring his right to privacy. Now, though, she opened herself to him fully, hoping the Force would give her insight she didn't have on her own.

What she found was a deep, gnawing fear that was so unlike him that Jaina flinched back a little in her seat. Jag Fel was not easily frightened. She had seen him stand toe to toe with Dark Jedi, Force-blind as he was, and not twitch a muscle. But there was no deny he was scared now, and when she probed a little deeper, she knew without a doubt that he was afraid of losing her.

Jaina climbed from her chair and took two steps to stand before him. He took her hand and kissed the knuckles softly, eyes averted. Jaina lowered herself down onto his lap, chest to chest, and took his face between her palms. He wrapped his own arms around her, right where the oversized pants hung low on her hips, and met her gaze steadily. "Jagged Fel," she began, "let's get one thing straight. I am not going anywhere. I am not going to change my mind. I am in this, with you, for as long as you'll have me. The rest of the galaxy can go straight to hell, but I'm going with you."

The tightness in his jaw loosened a little then, and his fingers slipped under her shirt to caress the bare skin at the small of her back. "I love you, Jaina," he told her simply. "Even when I tried not to, I loved you. Even if you broke my heart, right here and now, I would just go on loving you. I can't stop. I don't want to."

"Then don't," she smiled, and they kissed then, long and slow and tender. They took their time in a way they had not earlier, and Jaina enjoyed the space to relearn by touch every part of him that had changed. She had not been his lover in almost fifteen years, and he had acquired a host of new marks and scars that felt alien under her fingertips. But when he took her at last, there in the chair and again later on the bed, the years fell away like nothing and she was only Jaina again, and he was Jag, and together they were something beautiful.


End file.
